#not like i refuse to believe in a god that rejects my lesbianism

[beloved-child-of-the-house]

i didn't decide to be an atheist kinda like i didn't decide to be a lesbian. like. i just find the whole concept of god fundamentally unbelievable. i tried rlly hard/faked it when i was a kid living with my evangelical parents. but like. idk it never took and it just made me feel like there was something wrong with me. then when i was an adult i just decided to stop trying to believe in god and i felt so much better.

[cisthoughtcrime]

i’m an australian lesbian and i’m just so angry cause today the australian human rights commission ruled that we aren’t allowed to have single sex lesbian events anymore because that would be “unfair treatment” of trans women... they’ve just ruled that homosexuality is discriminatory i can’t believe this!! attraction and sexuality isn’t a choice and therefore can’t have discriminatory intent but they’ve declared we have to pretend like we maybe just haven’t met the right dick yet ugh!!!

oh my god, this is so fucked up, I'm so sorry

[quietwingsinthesky]

hey bug,

what do you think of

Gayest Supernatural Character, Quarter-Finals

drama and who do you believe is the truest queerest character in supernatural?

i think all spn polls drama is nonsense. it's fun until people start being actual assholes about stuff, and a poll like 'gayest spn characters' does make the worst elements of the fandom get overly aggressive trying to prove their claim to the queerest blorbo. a lot of people here have attached an unhealthy amount of their own identity to their favorite characters (and specifically, to a very narrow perception of said favorite characters) that leads to them lashing out when they feel that character disrespected, as it feels like a slight against them, personally. deeply strange and uncomfortable behavior when we should all just be talking about how crowley kisses men on screen for fun.

anyway, 'truest queerest character of supernatural' is a bit of a mixed bag because there's two options here. which character is the queerest textually, as in, was allowed to be openly queer and express queer love the longest and most often. and which character's subtextual narrative was most reflective of queerness, which is what a lot of people are arguing about the most. because you can't really argue about the first one. like. the only queer character who got to be queer, openly and constantly and for multiple seasons, make out with multiple women on screen, and not be treated like her sexuality is a joke is charlie bradbury. and we can talk about how well or poorly she's written as a character, but in supernatural, she is like a fucking lesbian beacon. and she's still bare fucking minimum in a cast whose other notable queers consist of 1) joke characters we are meant to mock for the fact that they are queer, 2) one-off characters who either die or in the case of later seasons where killing off gay people instantly because slightly less okay, do not get to express a lot of their queerness on screen before being shunted off to never scare the largely cishet audience again, or 3) villains. just like. villains. i know we love this about them, i know we're all gay little freaks here on the lucifer stan blog who enjoy that he's Like That about sam. but the fact that a lot of the villains on supernatural are queer-coded if not just openly queer is. :/ not great, folks.

and now we get to what my answer is for number 2) most subtextually queer. because like. it isn't charlie. charlie's queerness is not a part of her journey in any way. which is, kind of refreshing? but also very evidently the result of the writers not actually knowing how to integrate a lesbian into their story other than like. let her kiss women. charlie is written about as deep as a puddle 90% of the time, and that's the real crime we should talk about with her at the end of the day. getting distracted. anyway. for subtextual queerness. i mean, for me, it's sam. quite obviously, it's sam. sam the othered, sam the defiled, sam the broken and never pure. sam in his struggles trying to connect to a religion and a god who rejects him. sam who is and always will be the devil himself even when he proves that he can overcome him. sam who cannot win, no matter how quiet he makes himself and how much he acquiesces to the demands of the patriarchal family structure he's been slotted into.

hm. sam who knows he's dying, and sam who refuses to take a chance at life if it means burying everything about himself he's tried to construct and rising again as someone new.

i don't think you can honestly argue that sam's story doesn't resonate queerly. and i know this because most of the arguments i've seen against it have been "well, but sam (or sometimes "jared") feels too straight to be queer in any way". to which the only response can be THEY'RE ALL STRAIGHT. ALL OF THEM. THERE ARE NO QUEER MAIN CHARACTERS ON SUPERNATURAL. and yes, i am intentionally including castiel in there, for the people who argue his status as a main character. no. i don't think a love confession -> death pipeline is particularly compelling as a queer narrative, least of all because his potential queerness has always been treated like a joke or a reason to emasculate him, and to actually explore what it means that castiel loves dean winchester would take a much better show than supernatural could ever be. and it still wouldn't be a show that makes people happy, if it was honest, because it'd be a show about the slow and steady decline of one broken man constantly proven right about his paranoia and his abuse and his control issues, and one broken angel who has set him up as a god because he never really learned what free will was, just learned that following dean winchester means he has it.

[theexodvs]

The Handy-Dandy Exo Intro and FAQ!

27. Married. PCA deacon. My pronouns are uses/bathroom/standing. I am the intersection of BLM Tumblr, Christblr, and the part of Tumblr that criticizes MRAs.

Limited atonement and human sexual dimorphism are beautiful wonderful things.

Scrupulosity, touch starvation, and adolescence are figments of the psychoanalytical imagination.

I block all porn accounts I come across and unabashedly kink-shame.

My anons have anger issues.

When and why did you reject the men’s rights movement? The explanation can be found here.

Suicide-baiting is bad, m'kay? Yes, I know that now. I have apologized for the post you’re talking about, and have removed it.

Do you really think autistic people are perpetual children or think Autism Speaks is a reputable organization? Not anymore, and I haven’t in some time. I have redacted these statements publicly. However, most of my disagreements with other statements made by Temple Grandin and John Elder Robison still stand.

Are you a feminist? Depends largely on the definition. I don’t go about self-identifying as a feminist, but the fact I recognize women are vulnerable, even in rich, western countries, causes other people to see me as one. I stopped caring what people called me a while ago.

Doesn’t your refusal to call yourself a feminist make you as bad as Mpov or SirYouAreBeingMocked refusing to call themselves MRAs? It doesn’t make them “bad,” it makes them look ridiculous. The MRM is a much newer, smaller, and ideologically homogenous movement than feminism, and thus there are still major, definitive tenets it adheres to, all of which Mpov and SirYouAreBeingMocked agree with. The tenets of feminism vary widely by school of thought. I’m not even sure any feminist school of thought would want me in their ranks, while MRAs of all stripes will reblog posts from Mpov and SirYouAreBeingMocked like they’re God-breathed. They should just admit that they’re MRAs, and get on with their lives. It’s not like non-MRAs believe them when they deny being in the movement, anyway.

Why do you police other men’s masculinity? They have a very twisted view of what it means to be a man. They think that leaving scathing reposts towards angry lesbians with stupid haircuts is a good use of their time.

What’s with you and criticizing Israel/Zionism? I find myself under a religious umbrella term that includes those people who consider even the slightest questioning of modern Israel’s place in Biblical prophecy to be an unforgivable sin. Thanks, Jerry Falwell Sr!

Do you believe in replacement theology/supersessionism? These terms are meaningless neologisms invented by Christian apocalypticists in recent centuries to describe anyone who holds a different viewpoint regarding Biblical covenants. The only thing either of these terms has ever meant is “not dispensationalism.”

Which version of the Bible do you generally read? In English, I tend to use the NASB or ESV, depending on the context, as they are both devoted to accuracy in translation. Since I was able to find a bilingual Chinese-English Bible with ESV, that’s the one I use in print, while the NASB is what I use on my phone. For Chinese, I use either the CUV or RCUV (the latter I use in print).

What is your political philosophy? I'm a theonomist.

Are you an advocate for purity culture? The main issue I have with purity culture as it is currently practiced in American evangelicalism is that it expects more from women than from men. If we shamed men who slept around (regardless of their political affiliation) and stigmatized men in revealing clothing, I believe that purity culture can be viable.

Why do you generally refuse to engage SirYouAreBeingMocked? He is not actually interested in truth. He is interested in having a debate.

Why is a doctrine that teaches there are some people who are hellbound a beautiful, wonderful thing? Because the important part of Malachi 1:2-3 is not, “Esau I have hated,” but, “I have loved Jacob.”

I’ve found your account on a different website/know your actual name! And?

[homosexual-fanfiction]

Hi Camp! :D

I just wanted to say thank you so much for posting The Negligible Self, I loved it so much! The ANGST and tension literally had me squeeing out loud, I was hooked. Omigosh I'm such a fan of these dorks. I was like, GET TOGETHER ALREADY DAMMIT.

Also, the way you write is so wonderful! The chapters went by so fast and I ended up staying up waaaay later than I should on a work night (the curse of "oh, one more chapter" attacked me). The entire story felt like so much love and care was put into it and was so so so well thought out.

AND REIGANS INTERNAL MONOLOGUING WAS SO WELL WRITTEN. I find Reigan to be a kinda hard character to write tbh but the way you wrote his thought process out and him refusing to come to terms with his feelings and even consider his emotions are requited with Serizawa is so accurate and so obnoxious to read (in a good way).

ALSO ALMI AAAAAA I REALLY LIKED HER WHHHHY!!! My heart! I adored her character and the complexities you added with her relationship with the guys. Her part of the story was so sad and I really became attached and started wondering how she was doing and if she was okay and aaaaa. I became attached to the sweet older lady character.

Literally some parts made me chuckle out loud too like with Dimple being well, himself.

Also, your notes on the chapters were really fun and made me smile too. I love the voice you use when writing your thoughts. (Literally laughed at Reigan pushing you down the stairs, your dorky laugh noises, stepping over Reigans body, etc.) It really helped lighten the mood. I actually looked forward to your notes alot too! I'll miss those.

The ending is so wonderful and I loved your story so much the the life you breathed into all the characters and their relationships.

I'm looking forward to reading more of your works, sorry I gushed so much and thanks for reading my word vomit ashdgbdhcj! Great job, I loved it so much and thank you again so much for writing and posting it! Please never stop writing! (well, unless you want to obvs but yeah you know what I mean.)

-☆Rosie

BAUUH! hello! thank YOU for reading & going out of your way to come leave me a message :) i'm so glad you enjoyed it, it was a blast to write!! i'm already missing it haha [facing very deliberately away from the epilogue wip]

i hope you got enough sleep in the end lol, and yeah i tried very hard to make reigen rationalize everything he was doing in his own infuriatingly reigen way. i've said this before so apologies if you've already heard it, but it's funny how such a huge plot point was reigen REFUSING to come clean about shit when i generally hate to read a fic that relies on miscommunication or just a lack of communication.

but like reigen is obnoxious and he really wouldn't believe serizawa liked him back even if it slapped him in the face (or held him and cared about him and put a flower behind his ear and tucked him into bed and brought him food and came back to his apartment again and again and again to make sure he was okay (reigen voice if they found out who i really was they'd reject me in an instant)) so i tried my best to play off of that in the most reigen way i could lol. very glad that didn't seem to annoy people out of reading

god aimi AHH aimi... i'm so glad you like her! my poor little lesbian lady, she was only doing what she could. wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but unfortunately... yeah

and aw i'm glad you liked my goofing in the notes too, most of that really was just the first thing that came to my mind lol. the stepping over reigens body one was planned a few days in advance tho, i could not pass up that opportunity. and dimple was so fun to write he does NOT miss a chance to take a shot and we love that about him. dimple our favorite little hater

thank you so much again, it really was a ride to get that all done start to finish and i'm very happy that people out there enjoyed/are enjoying the story :) and you don't need to apologize at all haha. i'll write for as long as i have the inspiration to <3

[mariacallous]

The Church of England currently teaches two totally incompatible visions of God. On the one hand, there is a gospel of grace, where the love of God is unconditional and available to all. On the other, there is a God who places restrictions on that grace and asks the church to act as the gatekeeper. The latter teaches that if someone like me, a lesbian, has sex then I will go to hell – a truth as central to this branch of faith as believing in the virgin birth or the resurrection.

For years, the church’s solution to this contradiction has been to kick the can marked “LGBT+ relationships” down the road, and the “historic” proposals announced last month on sexuality were no exception. They continue to embed discrimination by refusing to recognise civil marriage as “holy matrimony” and only offer token prayers of blessing to gay couples, cunningly blessing the individuals rather than their union. There are also many shades of grey – especially as to whether our unions can actually now be consummated. All this from our established church, the official state church that operates thanks to delegated powers from parliament, which continues to be allowed to discriminate against those it serves.

This is an unholy fudge. It is a mess designed to try to keep us all happy but that has only succeeded in upsetting everyone. Progressives are angry – they know that while discrimination remains embedded in our teaching, LGBT+ people’s lives will continue to be severely impacted and pose a major safeguarding risk. Conservative Christians are miserable, issuing a statement saying that any hint of change will mean that they will call on their churches to leave the established church.

The church cannot be allowed to continue kicking the can down the road. That is why I have tabled an amendment at the General Synod next week, requesting that provisions for equal marriage legislation be brought back to the synod at its next meeting in July. I am not alone – following her tea with the archbishop of Canterbury, Sandi Toksvig has concluded that “the present position is untenable”. Parliament was also given a warning by Peter Bottomley, the father of the House, during an urgent question last week, when he said that “the Church of England needs to wake up”. Even Penny Mordaunt, leader of the House of Commons, has said as much in a letter to her bishop.

The proverbial can in this scenario is the LGBT+ community and our relationships, and we get badly hurt every time it is kicked. Current church teaching has already cost far too many LGBT+ lives. It has led to countless LGBT+ teenagers being rejected by their families while others are crushed by heavy weights of shame and guilt. A large number have left the church, such as Wes Streeting MP, who last week in parliament told his own story of rejection and hurt.

Against this backdrop, my synod amendment also proposes that we remove the apology that the bishops have tabled in their motion, which seeks to “lament and repent” for the harm that the church has “caused and continues to cause” LGBT+ people. I believe this would be better until such a time that this discrimination, the “kicking”, embedded in the current proposals ends. Put simply, it is sheer hypocrisy for the church to apologise while at the same time wilfully enabling the abuse to continue. It is also hypocritical for the archbishop of Canterbury to say that he “joyfully celebrates” the provision of prayers of blessing for gay couples while refusing to say the prayers himself and while stating that he would rather the church be disestablished than split over same-sex marriage.

The powers that be in the Church of England would like us to accept that this is just an issue of differing “points of view” with each having equal merit, despite the harm that is inflicted on the lives of LGBT+ people. It won’t work. Those vigorously opposed to equal marriage will never accept there is a diversity of views on this. To them, prayers, blessings, marriage are all the same – if any ground is conceded then all is lost. That is why the matter needs settling now, once and for all.

I understand it was political expediency rather than doctrinal theology that lay behind the bishops’ proposals, as they did not believe that a vote on equal marriage would get sufficient support in the synod. Rather than capitulating to these fears our bishops – and indeed all those on the synod – need to show some spiritual leadership and embrace the Anglican moral tradition of conscience, making room for a plurality of views.

Unless we do, I foresee this will be the hill on which the Church of England, quite literally, will die.

[blonkk]

these people have no idea what human rights are.

this entire movement is made up of predatory and/or misinformed adults and brainwashed children.

like you are actually out of touch with reality if you read this and think it’s a violation of rights. the only thing that would pose a threat to children is potentially outing them to their parents, which would obviously put them in danger.

but it’s incredibly overblown — the majority of parents wouldn’t abuse or abandon their kids, they might refuse to accept them and/or seek out therapy or treatment for them, but that’s not the same thing. i’m not saying kids should be forced to live with parents who don’t accept them but sadly that’s life; there’s a clear line between life-threatening / traumatic abuse and discomfort.

for example i grew up in a mildly religious/cultural family and had many uncomfortable times as a teenager knowing my parents weren’t happy with my values. even as an adult who’s been out of my family home for years i still live with the knowledge that my mom doesn’t agree with my lifestyle (not saying being gay is a choice/lifestyle). but if i was trans and tried to get the woman who literally carried me and gave birth to me to refer to me as a male i know she wouldn’t go along with it. maybe it’s a false equivalence, but she knows i don’t believe in god /islam yet she always mentions how she prays for me and sends me verses/blessings in the muslim way. i don’t get anything from it, and sometimes i roll my eyes but it’s not hurting me in any way. she’s doing what she thinks is best, yes sometimes it may seem like she’s ignoring my beliefs, but that’s fucking life. she loves me and i love her and we won’t ever come to a harmonious agreement here.

anyways. this movement is dangerous and insidious. conflating trans skepticism with being a republican/conservative is a great way to scare people who care into submission.

reminder: concern for children is the most important thing and if you feel like something is off don’t repress that feeling to placate these pedophilic and opportunistic freaks.

being gay/bi/lesbian is not the same as being trans. this “queer” umbrella doesn’t exist. the lgb movement is being co-opted by homophobes and pervs who use a slur to move their agenda forward.

children should not be brainwashed in schools to “present” as a certain gender, that certain interests and hobbies make them more of another gender.

children should not be put on life-altering medication which can do irreversible change/damage to their bodies and minds (despite what trans activists say. they claim to support the community yet silence and ignore science and detransitioners).

parental consent is required for any medication children may need/want. that’s not a violation of their rights. children are vulnerable and incredibly susceptible to social pressure — we don’t allow them to vote or operate vehicles or drink etc, yet they should be able to make decisions that have a high likelihood of being regretted and harming them?!

children should not be told if they can’t access these “rights” their families will reject them and they’ll be compelled to kill themselves. they shouldn’t be encouraged to leave families to “safe, caring adults” — this is literally grooming. it’s cult practise.

children shouldn’t be taught that if they’re a little different and don’t conform to rigid gender stereotypes they are fundamentally wrong and should undergo endless medical procedures to “fix” themselves. if being “yourself” requires you to change natural aspects about yourself, it’s not genuine.

males shouldn’t be in female sports/spaces, full stop. females safety and comfort comes before validating males in every situation. the claim that “this decision has drawn criticism from national sports organizations” is a blatant lie — sports orgs have been going along but thanks to the work of mostly female athletes and sports advocates as well as international sports orgs males are being rightfully kept out and separate categories are being implemented in some situations for those who wish to self identify.

this “movement” is an erratically thrown together puzzle made up of the work and rights of other actually oppressed groups. they steal from lgb advocacy, co-opt rhetoric from blm and use colonialism and victims of racism by repurposing it to falsely fit they’re narrative. they are not only dangerous and manipulative, they are grossly self-centered and narcissistic.

fascism defined: characterized by doctoral leadership, centralized autocracy, forcible suppression of opposition.

this movement claims that any criticism is fascist, yet refuses to entertain any of it. they’re answers to any questioning consists of thought-terminating cliches and religious mantras. “trans rights are human rights.” “trans women are women”. etc.

they are being accommodated in our society with little to no opposition and any fair scrutiny is vilified as fascist. actually, forcing people to accept your religious-like devotion to the trans creedo and socially punishing them via doxxing, cancelling or slander seems more fascist. trying to repress the truth and silencing detransitioners and critics is fascist. luring vulnerable young people into your cultish echo chamber is fascist. you are suppressing free thought, making people distrust and question their inherent instinct and punishing dissent.

people need to wake up and see this for what it really is; a male rights movement that centres the needs of predators, child groomers, and bio males over women and children. it boosts the pharmaceutical industry’s power over people and makes them millions of dollars. it actively undoes work done to protect and uplift women, children and racial minorities.

via sarworthman on instagram

[spirituallesbianblog]

LGBT Lesbian Kids - The Broken Hearts Of Humanity

'While shadow-dancing my way to a new and improvised version of myself in relationships I encountered a glitch we all seem to get stuck in'

This is the serial killer of romantic, family, and friendship unions and why we walk into minefields on repeat instead of creating a lesbian partnership that ticks all the boxes of compatibility and mutual respect. You see we like the familiar and are drawn to it like shooting stars as we return to relationships that fail us on all levels of communication, companionship, and that nugget of gold we refer to as intimacy. And with this limited awareness, we try to build an empire union, with the limited information endorsed by our parent's interpretation of what a successful relationship looks like. In most cases, a romantic or marital partnership is measured by its longevity and that can be a smokescreen for emotional neglect. In fact, our first view of relationships can be the dark mark of abuse as our trusted guardians play a game of co-dependency, control, or mental mistreatment. This sets the tone for young lesbian love and how we interact with our feelings and the memo received from their parents. Our early influencers on the path to same-sex romance. And how this pans out can depend on the transparency shared between daughters and parents in regard to their child's gay stance. For some, the lay of the land could be a mix of religious indignation meaning mom and dad might instantly reject their daughter's admission of being gay. This is a tough call for a young lesbian who found the courage to share who she is only to be met with disapproval from her guardians.

'The familiar truth for parents who are devoutly religious may be that being gay is a sin and wrong so their daughter must either be possessed by demonic spirits or mentally impaired'

The reason is their familiar belief system in God does not approve of their child's sexuality and it's not necessarily the fault of the parents who may have been raised in this religious light and cannot see past their daughter's aversion to romantically love her own kind. What happens next is a mammoth split in the family dynamic as each person struggles to find common ground and what once may have been a loving home life is now shattered by the lesbian elephant in the room. This is a puritanical approach synonymous with old-world religion and will be delivered as a blight on the family name as this young lesbian becomes the black sheep in need of intervention by the church elders. The damage to this child's confidence and definition of herself is now in a holding tank as she feels the push away from those who are closest to her. You see the architects of this girl's existence adhered to the familiar and could not agree with their daughter's discovery she is gay and unwilling to compromise. The initial outcome is likely to be a stand-off as her custodians take in the news and refuse to negotiate their religious mindset. This scenario is being played out in homes across the world as the unfamiliar is met with disdain and disbelief. Some may feel their daughter is tainted and no longer a part of their collective. A sad happening that sees kids out on the streets estranged from siblings and parents who could not shake their familiar thinking in order to negotiate their daughter's sexuality.

'They say familiarity breeds contempt and there is validity in this saying as humans hold on tight to their convicted ideals that may be inherited down through the ages or as a 'majority rules' ethic'

A well-versed unwritten rule that if most people believe something then it must be so. In the case of our young; lesbians their mom and dad may feel out of sorts and interpret their feelings as shame and guilt for not fulfilling their parental roles according to their values. And with no resolution or shifting of ideals, the family foundation fractures as love is withdrawn on the grounds of long-held principles. It's a travesty and way of the world as people struggle to challenge the familiar when the contrast is too hard to embrace. Our stick-in-the-mud mentality sees our gay youth falling by the wayside when the power of religious virtue dismantles a family unit. This can inhibit growth as we adhere to customs set permanently in stone by institutions like government and religion rendering a powerful influence over the masses in a message of compliance. The only way to effect change is to find the rebel within. These are the gay and heterosexual misfits brave enough to go against the tide of conformity and open the castle door to the new and innovative. By doing so they unearth the flaws in our conditioned programming and inspire us to be wildly curious and inquisitive. A cynical salute to a Piscean age of following the familiar while expressing words of religious retort and values designed by those who back limited thinking.

'As we choose to jump ship from the Matrix our hearts and minds are open to new potentials and ways of living a free-spirited life'

A New Earth rationale of high-vibrational expertise in the arena of human kindness, compassion and dare I say it.  LOVE that bandied about word that comes with restraints in relationships, and honoring the self. Love has come to mean so many things and is heavily disguised by words like control, abuse, and misdirection of humanity's pathway to the enlightened. The lottery win of soul through human enterprise is like setting sail for unchartered shores where starting fresh is the key to tearing down the walls of ancient programming. A learned ethic drilled into the minds of mankind as the familiar way to go about life according to whoever decided how it should be done. And when we know the first signs of religion appeared in prehistoric times it becomes apparent how long we have been influenced by those who interpreted a God that had dominion over all on Planet Earth. The early days of religious doctrine set standards of morals and values pertaining to the laws of God and were written into the text as a preferred way to live one's life. Each religious faith had its own unique pathway. And that was the worship of a divine guiding a worldly collective either on a journey of the soul via reincarnation. Or an ethic of morality governed by the teachings that humanity is made in the image of God. A matriarch that sends humans to heaven or hell depending on their good or bad deeds.

'There are around 4000 or more recorded religions that create a power-pack of authority over their flock'

They do this by ignoring any teachings that disagree with the way they love their God. From this, we can ascertain religion is one of the most familiar frequencies humming its sway across every town, city, and nation while excluding citizens of society who do not have God's favor and face the consequences of disconnection. And that is closeness to those who may see your lesbian or gay light as evil in the eyes of the divine. Such ingrained thinking sees young lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, and gays shown the door. By families who cannot love a child which nullifies their vision of a creator who blacklists homosexual humans. From this perspective, you can imagine being a teenage lesbian holding a candle for her unique sexuality in a family that denies her authentic self. The motif of same-gender lovers on a planet of religious persuasion. In saying this there is a distinctive pull away from the harsh stand one might have seen in the Middle Ages when witches were persecuted and burned for their Godly crimes. Sadly the aura of belief in a judicious God has not left our world and hovers over the lives of the different and beautiful gay men and women who honor their choice point in love.

'I personally live by the code of reincarnation and a soul partnership that invites other souls on the journey to interact through moments of contrast for optimum growth'

A program shared by the universe as a mysterious dark matter fills the void every time a soul feels the transformative force of Nirvana. A mythical high-vibrational moment that defines a soul's entry to enlightenment. In this magical place of co-creation, my life as a lesbian takes on a sense of self-love and pride for birthing here in this unique way. My free-spirited nature works enchantingly alongside a pioneer of the cosmos that supports and inspires their beloved souls. Brave enough to take on the conflicted animation of Earth. A go-to destination for souls wanting an epic time on a planet where anything could happen and usually does. What might trip up a soul on the road to higher learning is the bogged-down effect of getting caught in all things familiar. For example, you may reincarnate into a culture where lesbian sexuality is punishable by law and be forced to hide the fact for fear of retribution. The familiar story of mankind's opposition to what they can't perceive as normal is a roadblock to our species' ability for compassion and understanding when it comes to what is deemed unorthodox. It is a human frailty to hold on tight to habitual ideas about ideas of skin color, sexuality, and cultural variances as a kind of nostalgic concept drilled into our DNA for thousands of years. The familiar is like a soft blanket that makes us feel comforted and there lies the context of no change to thought patterns that breed hate, racism, and disunion.

'As long as we keep the premise that something is familiar and therefore right we will hold humanity back from awakening to a Shangrila-inspired world'

A land of plenty. Where the walls come crumbling down and our hearts open to our earthly brothers and sisters we are all of cosmic-soul descent and more similar than we have been programmed to think. If we are born of the divine and choose how we want to look, act, and experience this 3-D kingdom we might also choose to incarnate as a resident of China, America, or Russia as a feminine who will enact her life as a bisexual or lesbian. This allows us to consider there may have been past lives where we made different choices in order to encounter adventures for expansion. It is only our entrenched affection for the familiar that keeps us forever stuck in a repeat overview of ancient absolutes. Constantly spoken from staunch thinking about how our world should be run. It's a tight-lipped regime of order that prevails today as 'negativity bias' a global reaction to the downside of life and streaming freely through the workplace, relationships, and general interactions. In fact a tipping point of apathy and checking in on the darker side of life rather than the positive. It's a testament to our hard-wired responses to the negative news broadcasted via media outlets. If you want to create a familiar thought and action, the way in is through the kids looking for guidance and stimulus.

'The young gays and lesbians take their lead from whoever speaks their language and that can be from the streets, music icons, or family who stamp their kids with long-held beliefs'

If this is a religious rejection of gays their life can be embued with feelings of worthlessness and self-hate. A disempowerment of their unique blueprint and LGBT ID. Our worldly comfort zone is exploding with epidemics, climate change, and economic instability a wake-up call for humans to turn a page with old standards and judgments of anything that's not familiar. So how well do we think these archaic ways are working?  Is it time to change the BIAS rhetoric? The 'New Earth' voiced in the bible and in New Age teachings has no use for prejudice, racism, or attitudes of defense against people of magic, psychic abilities, and lesbian sexuality. It will be a free-range Elysian where freedom prevails in the hearts of the traditional and dissident. The crystalline co-creation of a smarter and more congenial world that flies the flag of camaraderie. And supports Mother Earth, the animals, and our prestigious place in this universe. A focus for fabulous young lesbians to grow and flourish with parents who have shaken the patterns of lifetimes. Can you visualize a time on Earth when all gays will prosper under the umbrella of an unconditionally loving god? Where mankind crosses the precipice of division and hate? The door to "New Earth' is opening. Will you walk through it?

'The desire to decline those who feel too different to embrace is what we deem as familiar'

Author ~ Linda E Cole

[ostermad-blog]

So, Queer is a political identity formed in opposition to a cultural default (cisheterosexuality). We created Queer as a unifying label as part of an organizing strategy to demand our rights and recognition in the face of larger structural forces that seek and sought to erase and eliminate us and the challenge to those forces we embody.

In a world where that default does not exist, where those structural/cultural forces are not in effect, both cishet and LGBT+ people still exist, but the latter group are not Queer.

This construction of Queerness is similar to black vs Black. Little b black is a color that skin can be. Capital B Black is a racialized political category formed in opposition to a presumed default of whiteness. In a world without white supremacy, black people exist but are not Black.

Dream Askew, a ttrpg by Avery Alder, is a Queer game because your community is expressly marginalized and exists on the fringes of a 'normal' society. Arguably almost all Belonging Outside Belonging games are Queer, due to the depicted communities existing on the margins of and in opposition to a larger, dominant cultural mode (this includes Dream Apart, a game about shtetl Jews living on the fringe of goyish society).

D&D is not, and has never been a Queer game. The existence of gay, lesbian, trans, ace, etc. characters within a text does not make it Queer unless the systemic force of cisheterosexism also exists. To play Queer within D&D is to find an identity at odds with and marginalized by the structures and assumptions of the game world - the followers of a faith that believes there should only be one God and are thus discriminated against and ridiculed for their obvious foolishness, or a movement that rejects the use of magic in all its forms.

Stardew Valley is also not a Queer game. You can be gay in it, but a gay relationship functions exactly the same as a straight one. I like Stardew Valley a great deal. Playing as a farm dyke is a ton of fun. But the game is not Queer.

Deadly Weapons by Adira Slattery is a Queer ttrpg. You play a girl, whether your character knows it or not, and you are endlessly entangled (both romantically and oppositionally) to demons the rest of the world cannot engage with and refuses to acknowledge are real.

To put this another way, games offering dark skin tones and weaves don't automatically allow the player to play Black. If Elden Ring let me add top surgery scars or choose my character's genitals and secondary sexual characteristics separately, my character would not be Queer.

I can play gay or trans on D&D all I want, and that does not make it a Queer game, no matter how welcoming WOTC is. Hell, one of my ttrpgs is a trans-themed magic school game, and it is arguably not a Queer game either.

I understand and appreciate your work to make Queer/not Queer less binaristic, but in doing so you've conflated LGBT+ identities with being Queer which, while absolutely true in the real world, is not necessarily true in our fictional game worlds. I think there's a lot of joy and wish-fulfillment in playing LGBT+ characters in worlds where they are not marginalized for their identity, in dreaming up futures in which we are fully normalized and assimilated into the mainstream. Many of the games I run do this. But that normalization, where LGBT+-ness is commonplace, makes these games not Queer.

“This RPG is a queer game!” “No it’s not!”

Have you seen these kinds of arguments on the webz? So have I! And I think this is an issue of people arguing without a common baseline of terminology. So let’s see if I can help out with that.

Like all sorts of other Queer Nonsense™️, how queer a game is isn’t a binary, it’s a spectrum! In this case a spectrum corresponding to the NPC attitudes from 3rd Edition D&D.

Queer-Hostile: this game explicitly does not want you to tell queer stories. It hates you for who you are. Do not tell this game you’re queer!

Queer-Unfriendly: this game doesn’t actively hate you for being queer, most likely because it doesn’t acknowledge the existence of queerness in any way, but might make you uncomfortable in general by just being too conservative and weird about other stuff like race and gender equality. If you tell this game you’re queer, it will say “if you must, I guess.”

Queer-Indifferent: this game probably won’t acknowledge queer identities in any way, but not in any kind of malicious way. It genuinely doesn’t care. If you tell this game you’re queer, it will say “okay.”

Queer-Friendly: while not explicitly about queerness, the general vibe and acknowledgment of queer identities will most likely make you feel welcome, and the writers probably genuinely want you to enjoy yourself! If you tell this game you’re queer, it will say “yay!”

Queer-Helpful: this game is about queer narratives. Don’t like it? Tough! This game will tell you you’re queer.

Hope this helps. ☺️

[dwellordream]

“To understand what friendship between women was, we must first understand what it was not. Before turning to the ways in which female friendship illustrated the play of the Victorian gender system, we must develop grounds for distinguishing it from other relationships between women. This is a detour, for the subject of this chapter is female friendship; erotic desire and marriage between women are the focus of subsequent sections. But friendship, erotic infatuation, and female marriage have so often been conflated, and women’s relationships so commonly understood as essentially ambiguous, that the detour is a necessary one. 

The language of Victorian friendship was so ardent, the public face of female marriage so amicable, the comparisons between female friendship and marriage between men and women so constant, that it is no simple task to distinguish female friends from female lovers or female couples. The question “did they have sex?” is the first one on people’s lips today when confronted with a claim that women in the past were lovers—and it is almost always unanswerable. If firsthand testimony about sex is the standard for defining a relationship as sexual, then most Victorians never had sex. Scholars have yet to determine whether Thomas Carlyle was impotent; when, if ever, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor consummated their relationship; or if Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick, whose diaries recorded their experiments with fetishes, cross-dressing, and bootlicking, also had genital intercourse.

Just as one can read hundreds of Victorian letters, diaries, and memoirs without finding a single mention of menstruation or excretion, one rarely finds even oblique references to sex between husband and wife. Men and women were equally reticent about sexual activity inside and outside of marriage. In a journal that described her courtship and wedding in detail, Lady Knightley dispatched the first weeks of wedded life in two lines: “Rainald and I entered on our new life in our own home. May God bless it to us” (173). Elizabeth Butler, whose autobiography included “a little sketch of [her] rather romantic meeting” with the man who became her husband, was similarly and typically laconic about a transition defined by sexual intercourse: “June 11 of that year, 1877, was my wedding day.” 

The lack of reliable evidence of sexual activity becomes less problematic, however, if we realize that sex matters because of the social relationships it creates and concentrate on those relationships. In Victorian England, sex was assumed to be part of marriage, but could also drop out of marriage without destroying a bond never defined by sex alone. The diaries and correspondence of Anne Lister and Charlotte Cushman provide solid evidence that nineteenth-century women had genital contact and orgasms with other women, but even more importantly, they demonstrate that sex created different kinds of connections. The fleeting encounters Lister had with women she met abroad were very different from the illicit but sustained affair Cushman had with a much younger woman who became her daughter-in-law. 

Those types of affairs were in turn worlds apart from the relationships with women that Lister and Cushman called marriages, a term that did not simply mean the relationships were sexual but also connoted shared households, mingled property, and assumptions about exclusivity and durability. We can best understand what kinds of relationships women had with each other not by hunting for evidence of sex, which even if we find it will not explain much, but rather by anchoring women’s own statements about their relationships in a larger context. 

The context I provide here is the complex linguistic field of lifewriting, which brings into focus two types of relationships often confused with friendship, indeed often called friendship, but significantly different from it: 1) unrequited passion and obsessive infatuation; and 2) life partnerships, which some Victorians described as marriages between women. The most famous and best-documented example of a Victorian woman’s avowed but unreciprocated passion for another woman is Edith Simcox’s lifelong love for George Eliot, which has made her a staple figure in histories of lesbianism.

Simcox (1844–1901) was a trade-union organizer and professional writer who regularly contributed book reviews to the periodical press and published fiction and nonfiction, including a study of women’s property ownership in ancient societies, discussed in chapter 5. From 1876 to 1900, Simcox kept a journal in a locked book that surfaced in 1930. Simcox gave her life story a title, The Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, that foregrounded her successful work as a labor activist, but its actual content focused on what Simcox called “the lovepassion of her life,” her longing for George Eliot as an unattainable, idealized beloved whom she called “my goddess” or, even more reverently, “Her.”

Simcox knowingly embraced a love that could not be returned, though she was aware of reciprocated, consummated sexual love between women. Her diary alludes to a “lovers’ quarrel” among three women she knew (61) and mentions her own rejection of a woman who “professed a feeling for me different from what she had ever had for any one, it might make her happiness if I could return it” (159). Tellingly, though twentieth-century scholars often refer to Simcox euphemistically as Eliot’s devoted “friend,” Simcox rarely used the term, and modeled herself instead on a courtly lover made all the more devoted by the one-sidedness of her passion. Simcox defined her diary as an “acta diurna amoris,” a daily act of love, and aspired to keep it with a constancy that would mirror her total absorption in Eliot (3). 

After bringing Eliot two valentines in February 1878, Simcox wrote: “Yesterday I went to see her, and have been in a calm glow of happiness since:—for no special reason, only that to have been near her happens to have that effect on me. . . . I did nothing but make reckless love to her . . . I had told her of my ambition to be allowed to lie silently at her feet as she pursued her occupations” (25). George Lewes, the companion whom Eliot’s friends referred to as her husband, was present at most of these scenes, and he and Eliot tolerated and even enjoyed Simcox’s attentions, which they consciously construed as loverlike. 

During a conversation about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love poems, Sonnets from the Portugese, Eliot told Simcox “she wished my letters could be printed in the same veiled way— ‘the Newest Heloise,’” thus situating Simcox’s missives to her in the tradition of amatory literature (39). In private, Simcox indulged fantasies of a more sensual connection, reflecting on a persistent “love that made the longing and molded the caress,” and recalling how “[i]n thinking of her, kisses used to form themselves instinctively on my lips—I seldom failed to kiss her a good night in thought” (136). 

In trying to define her love for Eliot, Simcox significantly refused to be content with one paradigm; instead, she accumulated analogies, comparing her love for Eliot to both “[m]arried love and passionate friendship” (60). Like a medieval ascetic, Simcox eroticized her lack of sexual fulfillment, arguing that her love was even more powerful than friendship or marriage because, in resigning herself to living “widowed of perfect joy,” she had felt “sharp flames consuming what was left . . . of selfish lust” (60).

In an unsent 1880 letter to Eliot, Simcox again found herself unable to select only one category to explain her love: “Do you see darling that I can only love you three lawful ways, idolatrously as Frater the Virgin Mary, in romance wise as Petrarch, Laura, or with a child’s fondness for the mother” (120). By implication, Simcox also suggested that there would be an unlawful way to love Eliot—as an adulterer who would usurp the uxurious role already occupied by Lewes. She concluded by explaining that her relationship with Eliot was too unequal to be a friendship (120). 

In the absence of the sociological and scientific shorthand provided by sexology or a codified subculture, and in the absence of a genuinely shared life that could be represented by a common history or joint possessions, women like Simcox represented their unrequited sexual desire for other women by extravagantly combining incompatible terms such as mother, lover, sister, friend, wife, and idol. Other women deployed similar rhetorical techniques of intensification and accumulation to express sexual loves that were not equally felt and did not lead to long-term partnerships. 

At age twenty, Sophia Jex-Blake (1840–1912), one of England’s first female doctors and an activist who helped open medical education to women, met philanthropist Octavia Hill (1838–1912). In a biography of Jex-Blake written in 1918 that still adhered to Victorian rhetorical conventions, Margaret Todd called her subject’s relationship with Hill a “friendship” but qualified it as one that made “the deepest impression . . . of any in the whole of her life.” Jex-Blake considered the degree of love she felt for women to be unusual, writing around 1858, “I believe I love women too much ever to love a man” (78). 

During a brief relationship that Hill soon broke off, the two women may have been sexually involved, but even so their feelings were never evenly matched. During the period when the women were closest, Hill reduced their bond to mere chumminess by calling herself and Jex-Blake “great companions” (85). By contrast, Jex-Blake was in awe of Hill and described her as both child and mother, roles often eroticized for Victorians, writing in her diary of “My dear loving strong child . . . I do love and reverence her” (85). Even after the relationship ended, Jex-Blake thought of Hill as her lifelong spouse, referring twenty years later to the “fanciful faithfulness” she maintained for her first love, to whom she left “the whole of her little property” in repeated wills (94). 

Like Simcox, Jex-Blake used intensified language to underscore the uniqueness of her emotions. When she described inviting Hill on a vacation that included a visit to Llangollen, a site made famous by the female couple who had lived there together, Jex-Blake wrote of her “heart beating like a hammer” (85) and then described Hill’s response: “She sunk her head on my lap silently, raised it in tears, then such a kiss!” (86). Female friends often exchanged kisses, but Jex-Blake’s account took the kiss out of the realm of friendship into one of heightened sensation. Although it was common for female friends to love each other and write gushingly about it, Simcox and Jex-Blake also wrote of feeling uncommon, different from the general run of women. 

Simcox identified closely with men and Jex-Blake felt unable to love men as most women did; both were extraordinarily autonomous, professionally successful, and self-conscious about the significance of their love for women. Other women also had intense erotic relationships that went beyond friendship, but were less self-conscious about those relationships, which they rarely saw as needing special explanation, and which usually lasted years or months rather than a lifetime. An example of outright insouciance about a deeply felt erotic fascination between women is found in the journals of Margaret Leicester Warren, written in the 1870s and published for private circulation in 1924. 

Little is known about Warren, who was born in 1847 and led the life of a typical upper-middle-class lady, attending church, studying drawing and music, and marrying a man in 1875. Her diary attests to a fondness for triangulated relationships that included an adolescent crush on her newlywed sister and her sister’s husband, and a brief, tumultuous engagement to a male cousin whose mother was the dramatic center of Warren’s intense emotions. In 1872, when Warren was twenty-five, she began to write incessantly about a distant cousin named Edith Leycester in entries that reveled in the experience of succumbing to another woman’s glamour: “Edith looked very beautiful and as usual I fell in love with her....Tonight Edith took me into her room. . . . She is like an enchanted princess. There is some charm or spell that has been thrown over her.”

 Numerous similar entries recorded an infatuation that combined daily familiarity with reverent mystification of a sophisticated and self-dramatizing woman. Warren’s fascination with Edith lasted several years. Unlike Simcox and Jex-Blake, Warren never self-consciously reflected that her feelings for Edith differed from conventional friendship, but like them, Warren ascribed an intensity, exclusivity, and volatility to her feelings for Edith absent from most accounts of female friendship. Indeed, Warren rarely referred to Edith as a friend when she wrote of her desire to see Edith every day and recorded their many exchanges of confidences, poetry, and gifts. 

Warren fetishized and idealized Edith, was fixated on her presence and absence, and used superlatives to describe the feelings she inspired. Within months of meeting Edith, most of Warren’s entries consisted of detailed reenactments of their daily visits and the emotions generated by each parting and reunion: “Edith was charming tonight and I was happier with her than I have ever been. She looked beautiful” (287). Warren created an erotic aura around Edith through the very act of writing about her, through a liberal use of adverbs and adjectives, and by infusing her friend’s most ordinary actions with dramatic implications. 

Describing how Edith invited her to visit her country home, for example, Warren wrote, “Edith came in and threw herself down on the chair and said quietly and gently ‘come to Toft!’” (291). Although Warren got along well with Edith’s rarely present husband, Rafe, she relished being alone with her and described the awkward, jealous scenes that took place whenever she had to share Edith with other women (362, 369). Warren found ways to dwell on the details of Edith’s beauty through references to fashion and contemporary art. Like many diarists, Warren had an almost novelistic capacity to observe and characterize people in terms of prevailing aesthetic forms. 

She described Edith with flowers in her hair, looking like a pre-Raphaelite painting, and recorded her desire to make images of Edith: “I sd. like to paint her. . . . It wd. make a good ‘golden witch’ a beautiful Enchantress” (290–91). A ride with Edith inspired Warren to pen another impassioned tableau: “All the way there in the brougham I looked at Edith’s beautiful profile, the lamp light shining on it, and the wind blowing her hair about—her face also, all lit up with enthusiasm and tenderness as she leant forward to Rafe and told him a long story . . . I . . . only thought how grand she was” (369–70). 

Shared confidences about Warren’s broken engagement to their male cousin became another medium for cultivating the women’s special intimacy. By assuring Warren that she did not side with the jilted fiance´, Edith declared an autonomous interest in her: “‘I wanted you to come here because— because I like you.’ She was sitting at her easel and never looking at me as she spoke for I was standing behind her, but when she said ‘because I like you,’ she looked backwards up at me with such an honest, soft, beautiful expression that any distrust I had still left of her trueness melted up into a cinder” (290). 

Just as Warren heightened her relationship with Edith by writing about it so effusively and at such length, the two women elevated it by coyly discussing what their interactions and feelings meant. Before one of her many departures from London, Edith asked Warren: “‘[A]re you sorry I am going? . . . How curious—why are you sorry?’ Then I told her a little of all she had done for me . . . how much life and pleasure and interest she had put into my life, and she said nothing but she just put out her hand and laid it on my hand and that from her means a great deal more than 100 things from anyone else” (293). Edith’s gesture drew on the repertory of friendship, but in the private theater of her journal, Warren transformed the touch of a hand into a uniquely meaningful clasp. 

This is not to say the relationship was one-sided. If Warren’s diary reports the two women’s interactions with any degree of accuracy, it is clear that both enjoyed creating an atmosphere of pent-up longing. Edith fed Warren’s infatuation with provocative questions and a skill for setting scenes: “She asked what things I cared for now? And I said with truth, for nothing— except seeing her” (303). Three days later, just before another of Edith’s departures, Warren paid a call: When tea was over, the dusk had begun and I . . . sat . . . at the open window. . . . By and bye Edith came and sat near me. . . . The room inside was nearly dark, but outside it was brilliant May moonlight. . . . Edith sat there ready to go, looking very pale and very sad with the light on her face. . . . We did not talk much. She asked me to go to the party tonight and to think of her at 11. . . . She said goodbye and she kissed me, for the first time. (303–4) 

Warren is exquisitely sensitive to every element that connotes eroticism: a darkened room, physical proximity, complicit silence, a romantic demand that the beloved remain present in her lover’s mind even when absent, a kiss whose uniqueness—“for the first time”—suggests a beginning. Any one of these actions would have been unremarkable between female friends, but comparison with other women’s diaries shows how distinctive it was for Warren to list so many gestures within one entry, without defining and therefore restricting their meaning. Warren’s attitude also distinguishes her emotions from those articulated by women who took their love for women in a more conjugal or sexual direction. Her journals combine exhaustive attention to the beloved with a pervasive indifference to interrogating what that fascination might mean. 

Never classified as friendship or love, Warren’s feelings for Edith had the advantages and limits of remaining in the realm of suggestion, where they could expand infinitely without ever being realized or checked. Women who consummated a mutual love and consolidated it by forming a conjugal household were less likely to leave records of their most impassioned moods and deeds than those whose love went unrequited or undefined. Indeed, women in what were sometimes called “female marriages” (a term I discuss further in chapter 5) used lifewriting to claim the privilege of privacy accorded to opposite-sex spouses. 

Like the lifewritings of women married to men, those of women in female marriages assumed intimacy and interdependence rather than displaying it, and folded their sexual bond into a social one. They described shared households and networks of acquaintances who recognized and thus legitimated the women’s coupledom, liberally using words such as “always,” “never,” and “every” to convey an iterated, daily familiarity more typical of spouses than friends. 

Martha Vicinus’s Intimate Friends cites many nineteenth-century women who described their relationships with other women as marriages, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s magisterial, international study of The Homosexuality of Men and Women (1914) noted that same sex couples often created “marriage-like associations characterized by the exclusivity and long duration of the relationships, the living together and the common household, the sharing of every interest, and often the existence of legitimate community property.” 

Sexual relationships of all stripes were most acceptable when their sexual nature was least visible as such but was instead manifested in terms of marital acts such as cohabitation, fidelity, financial solidarity, and adherence to middle-class norms of respectability. Because friendship between women was so clearly defined and prized, one way to acknowledge a female couple’s existence while respecting their privacy was to call women who were in effect married to each other “friends.” Given that “friends” was used to describe women who were lovers and women who were not, how can we tell when “friends” means more than just friends? 

…There are many instances of published writing acknowledging marital relationships between women by calling them friendships. Victorian women in female couples were not automatically subject to the exposure and scandal visited on opposite-sex couples who stepped outside the bounds of respectable sexual behavior. Instead, many female couples enjoyed both the right to privacy associated with marriage and the public privileges accorded to female friendship. The Halifax Guardian obituary of Anne Lister in 1840 recognized her longstanding spousal relationship with Anne Walker by calling her Lister’s “friend and companion,” a gratuitously compound phrase.

Emily Faithfull, whom we will encounter again in chapter 6, was a feminist with a long history of female lovers. An 1894 article entitled “An Afternoon Tea with Miss Emily Faithfull” described her home in Manchester, decorated by “Miss Charlotte Robinson,” whom Faithfull readily disclosed “shares house with me.”80 Faithfull left all her property to Robinson in a will that called her “my beloved friend” whose “countless services” and “affectionate tenderness and care . . . made the last few years of my life the happiest I ever spent.” To call one woman another’s superlative friend was not to disavow their marital relationship but to proclaim it in the language of the day.”

- Sharon Marcus, “Friendship and the Play of the System.” in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

[echoghost1]

The Group Project From Hell

Word Count: 3396

For: @ghostgothgeek

Summary: Danny and Tucker get stuck working with someone that they really don't want to

My final contribution to Phic Phight during the time limit (and just barely at that)!

*throws confetti and then cries*

Anywho....

You can read the fic on AO3 or down below the cut as per usual!

“Alright class, I need you to break up into groups of three,” the teacher started and immediately the room broke into chaos as everyone started to gather up with their friends. Most could just share a look and nod or point to each other. Others decided they needed to push their desks together now. And a few had to cross the room because they had been separated for talking too much.

Danny and Tucker just reached out across the small aisle between them and held hands with each other without even needing to look. They would have reached for Sam too, but she didn’t have this class with them.

Once most of the class had reached their favorite people, and a couple of larger groups had finished debating over how they would break up, the teacher spoke up again.

“Is anyone not in a group?” the teacher asked as they looked around the room for any stragglers.

One lone hand made itself known.

“Ah, well let’s see,” the teacher pondered aloud as they scanned the room for the perfect place to put them.

It was then that Danny realized that his group was the only option. He slowly sunk into his seat and was torn between actually making himself and Tucker invisible or just letting this happen.

His only hope was that maybe the teacher would just not perceive them like usual.

He was not that lucky.

“Ah, perfect!” the teacher said with a single clap, “Why don’t you join Mr. Fenton and Mr. Foley.”

Knowing there was no way out of it, Danny just huffed and tried not to glare at the unwanted addition to his team.

The odd man out looked between the two with a wince and turned back towards the teacher, “Can’t I just work alone instead?”

The teacher rolled their eyes with a scoff, “The project is too large for one person. Unless of course there’s a problem?”

The way they asked sounded a lot more threatening than any of them liked, so they all just agreed to work together for fear of the consequences.

“Excellent! Now here is the rubric and let’s go over the project,” they said with a smile as if they hadn’t just vaguely threatened their students into forced cooperation.

“So,” Danny started crossing his arms with a frown as their third member slowly walked his desk over to join them, “who are we working with?”

He sighed, knowing full well what he was referring to, “Elliot.”

“You sure it isn’t, oh what was it?” Danny asked, pretending to remember the fake name the other boy had used.

“I believe it was Gregor,” Tucker supplied helpfully and with just as much annoyance in his voice that Danny felt. “From Hungry.”

Elliot threw his head back with a sigh, “I said I was sorry about that.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Danny spat and redirected his anger at the rubric instead.

The project was way too big for one person. It seemed a little daunting for three.

Tucker, the organized blessing that he was, already started to break down the project into much more manageable pieces. “Okay, I think if we can decide on a topic today, share contact info and after-school schedules, we can have an easier time lining up any group meetups and get this thing done in no time.”

Danny smiled and pulled out his notebook and flipped open to a blank page, “okay here’s my number and address and this is Tuck’s,” he finished and tore off the written section and handed it over and then slid his notebook over with his pencil, “you can just write your info there.”

Just because the guy irritated him, didn’t mean he couldn’t be civil. Besides he was willing to give him another chance, he just had to get his annoyance out of the way first.

“I don’t give my number out to just anyone,” Elliot said as he leaned back and refused to take the offering.

Danny just blinked.

Did he really just say that?

“Dude how are we going to contact you outside of class?” Tucker asked, shocked by the blatant disrespect.

Danny was doing his very best not to let the anger bleed into his eyes.

“I’ll text you if I need you,” he said as he snatched the note Danny wrote for him.

“Okay,” Danny said with as much restraint as possible as he slapped his hand on his notebook and slid it back onto his desk. “Fine.”

Tucker flipped the page of their packet and skimmed the page, “So, topics?” he said, clearly doing his best to just keep the ball rolling.

“I don’t care.” Elliot shrugged and pulled his phone out pointedly not participating.

Danny turned in his chair so he only looked at Tucker, “What are our options?”

“I’m glad you asked,” Tucker responded, also locking eyes with Danny and joining him in aggressively ignoring Elliot.

Tucker then read through the list as if it was just the two of them. He shared the page and pointed out the topics that he liked or that he thought Danny would like. Once they had marked the ones they liked the best they looked back to Elliot to see if he had any opinions at all.

“I don’t know if I really like any of those ones.”

“Which ones didn’t you like? The ones we pointed out or just the whole list?” Danny asked and if this guy said the whole list he was going to throw him out the window.

He shrugged, “I don’t know, all of them?”

This boy better get ready to be defenestrated.

Ha, see he could use that word in his everyday life! It wasn’t useless knowledge. Suck on that, Jazz!

Tucker had to forcibly push Danny back into his seat. “I know, buddy, I know.”

“We’re on the first floor. He’ll be fine.” Danny said through clenched teeth.

Tucker turned to just stare at him, stopping his calming shoulder pats due to his confusion. “I’m still not a telepath Danny.”

“Oh yeah.” sometimes he forgot that just because he was thinking it didn’t mean that anyone else was. But so often it seemed like everyone else knew what he was thinking before he even said anything.

Luckily his friends were always gentle with the reminder. They didn’t make him feel stupid or laugh at him when he did.

“I was just thinking how nice it would be to defenestrate him.”

Tucker snickered but shook his head all the same, “Dude, no. You haven’t gotten detention in like three weeks now, don’t ruin your streak.”

“Come on!”

“No! You would just get expelled or whatever.” he said, still chuckling at the idea of Danny yeeting that jerk with no hesitation, “Totally not worth it,” he reassured.

Danny huffed but relented all the same, “Fine. I won’t.” he locked eyes with Elliot, “This time.”

“Are you threatening me?” the blonde asked, finally reacting properly to his current situation.

“I don’t know? Am I?” Danny retorted back sarcastically.

“God, what did I ever do to you?”

“You lied to my best friend.”

“I said sorry. Besides she’s the only one who should be mad, and she forgave me already.”

“I know,” Danny mumbled.

And it was true. Sam had forgiven him. She said that sometimes people do silly things when they think they’re in love. Or just in high school in general.

“And I was willing to give you a second chance but you rejected my peace offering, so screw you.”

“What peace offering? You glared daggers when the teacher forced us together.”

“And then I was trying to get past that, and then you were difficult and didn’t just give your info. It’s not like we’re ever going to contact you after this project is over? Heck, I’ll probably just delete your number the second we’re done!”

Elliot rolled his eyes, “Oh my god you are so dramatic.”

“Says the guy who took that ‘world’s a stage’ line a bit too literal.”

“Well I am a thespian,” he said with too much emphasis as he pressed a hand to his chest as he peacocked.

“TMI?” Danny had no idea what thespian meant and couldn’t help but notice how it rhymed with lesbian. He was pretty sure the two words had nothing to do with each other, and even if they did it really didn’t make any sense given what they had been talking about.

Elliot’s stupid vocabulary just made Danny annoyed all over again.

“It means I’m an actor.” Elliot deadpanned. “I mean honestly you throw around the word defenestrate like you know what it means.” he laughed to himself before giving Danny a condescending smirk, “Do you even know what it means?”

Danny felt his jaw tighten so much that his dentist was probably wincing, “Defenestrate. The act of throwing someone out a window.” He stood up to his full height and loomed over Elliot as best he could while the blonde was still sitting down, “Would you like me to use it in a sentence?”

“Code green!” Tucker shouted as he shot up out of his seat and pulled Danny down so they were both squatting behind their chairs, “You need a minute?”

“Yes,” Danny said resting his chin on his knees and doing his best to relax.

Despite that his parents seemed to think that all ghost’s emotions were fake, Danny had found that the more he had gotten used to his ghost side, the stronger he reacted to things. He never used to get so angry. Or to do so, so quickly.

Of course, his parents attributed his outbursts to teen hormones. He really wanted them to be right, but just knew that they weren’t. One look at the crazed-up fruit loop pretty much blew that theory out of the water.

His fingers threaded their way into his hair as he tried to block out the bad thoughts and focus on the mantra Jazz had taught him when he finally admitted to having emotional control issues.

“I control my emotions. They don’t control me. I control my emotions. They don’t control me. I control my emotions. They don’t control me. They don’t control me. They don’t control me.”

Danny took a breath and finally relaxed. This might not be ideal, but he was getting better at calming himself down again.

He stood up and took his seat. "Sorry about that."

Elliot scoffed as he scrolled on his phone.

"I'm sorry about earlier. You're right," he sighed, "I was being dramatic. I shouldn't have taken my anger out on you."

Elliot just stared at him for a bit. Blinked. Then shrugged and looked back at his phone, "Yeah, whatever freak. Let's just get this project over with."

Danny stopped listening. He was honestly surprised he got past the word. The word. Why did he have to call him the one thing that hurt the most?

Stupid heightened ghost emotions and stupid Elliot for poking at his insecurities. He took a breath and tried to focus on the conversation.

He pointed lazily at the packet on Tucker's desk, "We picked a topic already. Let's just divide up the-”

Before Elliot could finish his sentence Tucker interrupted, “Stop.” he said in such a serious tone that both boys looked over at him.

“I’m going to need you to apologize to Danny, right now.”

Elliot scoffed and opened his mouth to say something, probably rude based on his expression, but Tucker just held up his finger.

“I wasn’t done yet,” he said and Danny could almost taste the simmering anger that radiated off of Tucker like the heat waves that made mirages in the desert.

But why was he mad? Why? Did Danny do something wrong? Why did he always ruin everything he touched?

“Hey, I’m not mad at you,” Tucker reassured softly before returning his ire back on Elliot. “Now I know you don’t know us very well, so I’m willing to give you a warning. Danny is like a post-credits grinch. There are just certain things we don’t do. Now, if you would kindly apologize for your rude remark we can get back to work.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“Tucker, it’s fine,” Danny muttered because he really just wanted this whole day to be over already.

Tucker sighed before turning to look at Danny directly, “Is it?”

Danny couldn’t meet his eye. Of course, it wasn’t actually fine. He just didn’t want to make it a big deal. Elliot clearly didn’t do it on purpose so it was fine. He was fine.

If he told himself he was fine enough times maybe it would be true.

It was quiet for a few seconds before Tucker refocused on their project.

Danny did his best to contribute even though he was still feeling a little down. Elliot kept being the worst and only actively worked on anything when the teacher was looking.

Tucker wrote down a few things for them all to work on for the week and suggested they meet up in the library on Wednesday after school to go over what they had done up to that point.

Elliot gave a very lazy and barely committal agreement to be there before the bell rang and they were finally able to leave.

It wasn’t until they were at Danny’s locker, did it feel like he could breathe properly.

“You sure you’re okay?” Tucker asked as he leaned against the locker next to Danny’s so when he opened the door, he’d still be in view.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Tucker was quiet and Danny didn’t need to see it to know he was making that face. The one where he knows Danny is lying and he should just come clean already.

“Why’d you have to call me a Post-Credits Grinch?!” he whined and hated every second of it. “You know I hate that movie!”

Tucker bit his lip as he tried not to laugh at Danny’s reaction, “It’s just because you’ve got a big heart? And it’s kind of like it grew three sizes recently, right?” he shrugged and added, “It was either that or reference that one vine and say you’re sensitive. But I knew you wouldn’t like that.”

“Oh well, thanks for the save, Aubrey.”

Tucker snapped into double finger guns, “Anytime, D-man!”

Danny snorted and shoved his textbook into his locker a little harder than he meant to, “Don’t,” he shook his head and couldn’t hold back his laugh, “Don’t ever do that again.”

“Not gonna happen.” Tucker playfully punched his shoulder, “Besides, it got you to laugh, didn’t it?”

Danny rolled his eyes, but he did have a point. Tucker always knew how to make him feel better. More like himself.

Less like a freak.

===============================================

It was Wednesday. School had ended about ten minutes ago.

Tucker and Danny had come in about two to three minutes later than they had intended, thanks to the Box Ghost and the unfortunate delivery man that had crossed his path.

Tucker sent Elliot a text once they got there apologizing for being a few minutes late and asking where he had set up.

There was a slight delay before Elliot texted back. First to ask how Tucker had gotten his number, to which Tucker simply said “A magician never reveals his secrets.”

Then Elliot finally admitted that he wasn’t at the library. He said he had something he needed to do first but he would be there soon.

Then it was radio silence.

Danny found a nice table in the back corner that was partially hidden behind the old reference textbooks. He liked it because it was secluded and quiet.

Tucker teased him and said he actually liked it because it was the darkest and spookiest corner.

Danny just blew a raspberry at him.

The pair got out everything they needed and took over the large wooden table. Each of them taking turns to go over their respective progress and discussing what they still needed to do.

It wasn’t until the librarian came around told them that she needed to close up for the night, did they realize that Elliot never came.

“What are the odds he hasn’t done anything yet?” Danny asked as he packed his things back into his backpack.

“Happy thoughts, Danny. Let’s just focus on our own work.”

Danny just nodded and made sure to securely zip his bag shut while also maintaining the structural integrity of it. It wouldn’t do him any good if he broke the zipper.

Sure he’d still be able to get in if he needed to, thanks to his ghost powers, but it would have been because of his ghost powers that the bag was broken. Also, it would be hard to explain why, or how, he was still using a broken bag to those who didn’t know his secret.

Which would be pretty much everyone.

“So you wanna go to my place and continue? Mom’s making lasagna tonight and it’ll probably be ready by the time we get there!” he said as he fidgeted with excitement.

He did love Mrs. Foley’s double meat lasagna. “Yeah alright, I just gotta call home first.”

“Yes!” Tucker fist pumped and sent a quick text to his mom.

===============================================

Danny didn’t mean to fall asleep at Tucker’s on a school night, he really didn’t.

On one hand, they ended up getting a lot done on their project. He got to eat so much yummy food that never once had a chance at coming back to life and trying to eat him, which is his favorite quality in food. His second favorite quality is, being not poison.

Also, Tucker’s house was always way warmer than his house ever was, and it was nice to just curl up in a pile of pillows and relax, because nothing in that house was designed specifically to kill him. It was a lovely little vacation.

The only downside was he hadn’t packed any clothes so all he had to wear was what he had come in. And wearing the same outfit two days in a row in the middle of the week, wasn’t exactly a good look.

Tucker was nice enough to offer his closet, which Danny happily accepted. Only Tucker had grown a few inches in the last year or so and was now taller than Danny. Also a little wider in the shoulders.

Good thing Danny liked to wear baggy clothes!

Of course, Dash made fun of him for his ill-fitting outfit almost immediately. It was like the guy had some sort of sixth sense that always picked up Danny no matter where he was.

When they got to their group project class, Tucker mentioned that they had gotten a lot done and if Elliot could type up what he had and send it to Tucker he could add it to the slide show they had started.

Elliot just shrugged and said he’d send it.

Tucker cleared his throat and added, “Please do so before midnight on Friday.” then he texted him his email address so he had no excuse not to.

“Yeah okay, whatever.”

===============================================

It was Saturday night. Danny was lounging on Tucker’s bed while he waited for Tucker to come back from the bathroom.

The notification ding went off on Tucker’s phone but Danny knew better than to touch the phone without Tucker’s permission. That didn’t stop him from floating over the phone a few inches and just looking at the screen while it was still lit.

Elliot had finally emailed his portion of the project.

Well wasn’t that nice of him to do so at, Danny looked at the time and saw it was past ten.

Lovely.

It was even better when Tucker got to open the email and the file he sent was just a text file.

“Why would you do that?” Tucker asked as he just stared at the icon, “In what world is that necessary?”

They were both glued to the screen and held their breath as Tucker clicked download and opened the file.

It was the most barebones weak excuse of his share that he could have possibly given.

“We aren’t sleeping this weekend, are we?” Danny asked knowing full well what the answer was.

“I should have let you throw him out of the window when I had the chance.”

[little-chattes]

Ok so I’ve done a complete re-read through and one thing that kept nagging at me was how little Gideon and Harrow’s relationship makes sense given its quite frankly abusive origins. Harrow spends her whole life making Gideon’s a living hell and Gideon just… forgives her. Total and complete forgiveness for an irredeemable girl.

At first I took the sudden shift in their relationship as lazy writing to rush along the end of the story, but that didn't make any sense either. Muir strikes me as an intensely purposeful writer. Then I remembered that Muir is also an intensely Catholic writer and it hit me. Muir isn’t writing a story about a healthy human relationship, oh no, she’s writing a story about Christ’s relationship with The Church… if Christ was a sword toting butch lesbian and The Church was a sardonic bone witch. Call it tender blasphemy. 

Now Gideon’s role as a Christ figure is fairly easy to parse out given that her dad is… God. But for the sake of self indulgence (I have to put my 15 year long flirtation with Christianity to use somehow) I’m going to go through all the parallels anyway. There are a LOT of them.

Let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start).

Miraculous Conception

Luke 1:34-38

34 But Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I [e]am a virgin?” 35 The angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; for that reason also the [f]holy Child will be called the Son of God. 

Gideon is conceived by artificial means when one of God’s own servants (Mercy) delivers a sample of John’s genetic material to Wake, a ‘normal’ human woman who chooses to carry Gideon in her womb. Notably, the sample lives far beyond its point of expected viability, thus making the conception somewhat miraculous (“Only the sample was still active, no idea how considering it was twelve weeks after the fact” HTN 441). 

The Cuckold

Matthew 1:18-25

18 Now the birth of Jesus the [a]Messiah was as follows: when His mother Mary had been [b]betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be pregnant by the Holy Spirit. 19 And her husband Joseph, since he was a righteous man and did not want to disgrace her, planned to [c]send her away secretly. 

Gideon the First decides not to kill his lover, Wake, and releases her out the airlock (AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE SAW ME AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME” from Harrow’s vision of Wake’s note, HTN 124) just as Joseph took pity on Mary, his betrothed, by deciding to divorce her quietly instead of making her infidelity public which would condemn her to death by public stoning (Deuteronomy 22:21). Gideon the First knew that Wake was pregnant and didn’t tell John because he thought the baby was his. Similarly, Joseph goes on to raise Jesus as his own son.

The Birth

Luke 2:7

And she gave birth to her firstborn son; and she wrapped Him in cloths, and laid Him in a [f]manger, because there was no [g]room for them in the inn.

 Neither baby Jesus nor baby Gideon were given a proper cradle, one being laid to rest in a manger where the animals ate and the other stuffed in a transplant bio-container (GTN 23). 

The Dead Children

16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.

King Herod intends to kill the prophesied King of the Jews and instead of finding the specific baby, he just has a bunch of them slaughtered. However, Jesus escapes the slaughter of the innocents by Herod when his parents secret him away to Egypt.

 When the great aunts gas the nursery and kill the 200, Gideon is meant to die along with them but escapes her fate.

Now this event has a completely different biblical connotation for Harrow. 

Firstly, the murder of the 200 children represents Original Sin. In the bible, Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, and as their descendants, all of humankind is doomed to also bear the weight of that sin from the moment we are born until the day we die. This is a fact that is drilled into Christians as soon as we’re able to understand it, we are born wretched and unworthy sinners, and there’s nothing we can do ourselves to fix that. 

“I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”

Harrow is a multitude, she is 200 children, the entire future of her house. Shes not just one human being,, she’s the whole damn church.

Naz/Nav

he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.

Although Gideon is not from the Ninth, she is given the Ninth name Nav when she arrives as a baby. Similarly, Jesus is known as Jesus of Nazareth, though that is not where he was born.

The Poor Bondservant

Jesus' role as a servant is emphasized many times in the bible. He was a carpenter's son born in a stable 

Philippians 2:5-8

Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.

 Gideon is described as being made “a very small bondswoman” (GTN 24)

The Sword

Matthew 10:34

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

The Wretched Sinner

Harrow is wretched, self loathing, and cruel. 

She is in thrall of the enemy of god, a figure who was once gods most favoured warrior, cast into hell.

She is like the depiction of the sinner who loves the devil

It's important to note that Harrow isn’t a single person, she is a multitude, the entire future of her people condensed into one body. 

The Enemy of God

20 Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, nholding in his hand the key to othe bottomless pit1 and a great chain. 2 And he seized pthe dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and qbound him for a thousand years, 3 and threw him into othe pit, and shut it and rsealed it over him, so that she might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.

Before the fall, Satan was described as a “guardian cherub” who resided in the garden with God (Ezekiel 28:14) 

(a funny aside, in the bible the devil is known as the great deceiver but in HTN Muir specifies that Alecto is incapable of lying)

A Life of Abuse 

Isaiah 53:3

"He was despised and rejected by mankind,

    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.

Like one from whom people hide their faces

    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem”

They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff" (Luke 4:28–29).

Gideon lives a life of mockery and is abused by Harrow.

An Unlikely Savior

Despite the fact that Gideon does not fit the expected image of a Cavalier, Harrow chooses Gideon to be her sword and protector.

Despite the many openings Gideon has to make Harrow pay for the pain she caused her, she remains loyal to her

Trust

Harrow realizes that she cannot face the lyctor trials without Gideon, and places her trust in her

Christians are told they must place their trust in jesus in order to reach salvation

Purifying Water

Acts 2:38

Peter replied, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Harrow confesses her sins to Gideon and puts herself at her mercy

Gideon forgives Harrow totally and completely, she baptises her

One Flesh

Mark 10:8

and the two shall become one flesh; so they are no longer two, but one flesh.

“The imagery and symbolism of marriage is applied to Christ and the body of believers known as the church. The church is comprised of those who have trusted in Jesus Christ as their personal Savior and have received eternal life. Christ, the Bridegroom, has sacrificially and lovingly chosen the church to be His bride” (x)

Ephesians 5:25-26

25 gHusbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and hgave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by ithe washing of water jwith the word,

They take the vow of necro and cav, one flesh one end

Gideon’s forgiveness of Harrow is reaffirmed

Harrow risks her life to stay and fight with Gideon, even if it means her death and thus the destruction of her death. Her love for Gideon is now greater than her love for the Body.

The Sacrifice

John 19:34

Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.

They will look on the one they have pierced'" (John 19:36–37).

Gideon chooses to die for Harrow, death by piercing

and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

In order to complete the lyctor process, Harrow both physically and spiritually consumes Gideon

Because of Gideon’s sacrifice, Harrow attains eternal life at the right hand of god

The Tomb

The Resurrection

1On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women came to the tomb, bringing the spices they had prepared. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus

Harrow turns her body into a tomb for Gideon, a tomb fashioned after that on the Ninth

Resurrection on the Third Day

Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. Luke 24:46-47 

“So many months had passed: and yet, at the same time, she had only lost Gideon Nav three days ago. It was the morning of the third day in a universe without her cavalier: it was the morning of the third day—and all the back of her brain could say, in exquisite agonies of amazement, was: She is dead. I will never see her again.” (HTN 374)

Just in case you missed this important piece of information, Muir repeats it three times.

Go, and tell them, then, that he that was dead is alive, and lives for evermore, and has the keys of death and the grave,"

[aethersea]

you know what, I never do these things, but actually I’ve decided I would like to get to know people better! I would like to partake of the mortifying ordeal! I would like to talk about myself for a bit!

ok for the next...let’s say five days I will answer any of these things that people tag me in, or any random personal questions you plop in my ask box. I don’t have an ask meme on hand but just....pick one you’ve seen recently, or make up questions of your own, and I’ll answer. (the answer might be ‘nope that’s private’ but I will answer.) (@ the anon who asked for book recs - I see you, I’ve been thinking of books all day, I’m going to give you SUCH a long answer, I hope you don’t regret your choices bc it WILL be full of gushing)

alright, let’s go!

🌻 Tag 9 people you want to get to know better

Tagged by @booksandchainmail​

Last Song: I’m currently listening to “Falcon in the Dive” from the Scarlet Pimpernel musical on loop. I watched one or two Scarlet Pimpernel movies when I was just barely too young to fully get what was going on, and the story’s held an odd but deep-seated place in my heart ever since. A few years ago I found out there’s a musical and most of the songs are pretty stellar (go listen to “Madame Guillotine” if you like big ensemble broadway numbers, it’s a banger, the bit where he cries out for God has been running through my mind on and off for a few days now haha not like that’s topical or anything), so every once in a while I spend a few days listening to them a lot.

Sometime last year I read the actual book, and got super into the whole concept of the Scarlet Pimpernel for a while. I plotted out Pimpernel aus for several fandoms, I read the entire wikipedia article, and I went looking for bootlegs of the musical. I didn’t find one, but I did find a full radioplay-style recording of the script, complete with full musical numbers, and listened to it like a podcast.

Reader, I was so disappointed. The play adds some scenes, bc a lot of the dramatic tension of the novel comes from internal conflict and that doesn’t stage super well, and the very first scene of this play – a play written in the NINETIES – features our dashing hero rescuing some aristocrats from a French prison, and then saying to the person in the next cell, who begs for rescue but is not an aristocrat, “We have enough of your kind in England.”

Enough! of your KIND! What in the merry frickety HECK my dudes!! The book has some rather unfortunate™ takes but it is from 1905, it’s regrettable but sadly to be expected. This play is from 1997. It has NO excuse. This scene wasn’t even in the book! What! the heck!

I was so disheartened that I lost my excitement for the play, and a couple songs later I stopped listening. It occurred to me just a few days ago that you could actually stage that ironically, with the person in the cell giving the audience a “can you believe this” look, and then the rest of the play could feature assorted non-aristocratic ensemble members constantly looking at the audience like they’re on The Office. And hey, maybe that’s what they did, or something similar – maybe that was never meant to be taken as a cleanly heroic stance, and the play deals with it in a complex way. It’s possible. I wouldn’t know. Kinda doubt it though, based on song lyrics.

Favorite Color: red, probably

Last Movie: I watched that new lesbian christmas movie with my family for christmas, the one with kirsten stewart and the guy from schitt’s creek. it’s very sweet and good and kinda sad, and I really enjoyed it. it also incidentally has the best gay best friend trope in probably anything ever, bc it’s not a trope (I didn’t realize until several hours after watching that it technically fits), it’s just a guy who is the protagonist’s best friend, and they’re just all gay, and then when he Gives Relationship Advice as a gay best friend always does, it’s advice about how to deal with your partner’s hangups around coming out.

actually every part of the gay best friend trope becomes better when they’re just best friends who are both gay. the big dramatic gestures (in this case, driving some ungodly distance in the snow on no notice) go from “haha how kooky” to “queer man will do anything he needs to to rescue his queer friend from an isolating & potentially triggering situation”. the relationship advice isn’t “honey you deserve some self-respect, treat yourself”, it’s a deeply sincere reminder of the vulnerability that is shared across almost everyone’s queer experience, and look I could ramble about this for a long time before reaching a coherent point but I’m INTO IT, okay? I’m into it.

Last Show: you want me to remember what show I last finished???? impossible, cannot be done, it was a long time ago and the adhd has eaten everything that happened before last week. here, instead I’ll tell you about another movie I watched, late at night with my mom in cozy companionship just a couple days ago. it’s called Quigley Down Under and it’s about a cowboy who goes to Australia and kills a bunch of racists, 10/10 would watch again. it’s from 1990 but it feels much older, with the music choices and the cinematography of a 70s Western. the cowboy is great, honorable and fearless and kind, but the breakaway star of this movie for me is the woman who attaches herself to his side and refuses to leave. her name is Cora, and she’s crazy, in the sense that she’s not altogether tethered to reality, but this never for a second diminishes her agency. she’s fierce and clever and compassionate, and she basically never does anything she doesn’t want to in the whole movie. her arc is about overcoming trauma by taking charge of her own fear and facing it head-on, she is never belittled or dismissed by the narrative or the protagonist, and look she’s just so cool. I love her. she’s so vibrantly alive. her story could probably have been handled with a bit more nuance, but honestly for the 90s it’s pretty great. I’m no expert, but I found nothing objectionable in it, just a bit of heavy-handedness.

anyway the theme of the movie is that racism is evil and racists deserve to be shot, and this too could have been handled better (not a single aboriginal character speaks a single line of english in this movie), but it follows through on that message in every way, while still being a fun kinda campy cowboy movie. overall a very good time.

Currently Watching: started showing my sister Hilda the other day, and she’s liking it! I love that show, it’s so incredibly cute. can’t wait to see season 2

Currently Reading: lmao I wish. lately the brain has firmly rejected all attempts to read anything of any length. currently pending, bc I was halfway through them when my brain stalled out, are tano’s fic What Does Kill You Can Make You Stronger, Too, a Toby Daye book - I think it was The Brightest Fell, I got like half a chapter in and haven’t picked it up in over a month, the Locked Tomb series, and probably a few other things too. ooh! also a book called Making Sex by thomas laqueur, which is my fancy academic reading that I’ve been doing in short bursts for the past year or two when I feel fancy and academic. it’s about the development of the concept of biological sex and of gender in Western society, and it’s fascinating. has among other things introduced me to the idea that until quite recently, fathers were a matter of faith. the mother? yeah, you can watch the baby pop out, we all know who the mother is. but the father? how can you know? how can you really know? we have paternity tests these days, but for all of human history up until now, we've just had to take fatherhood on faith. (not to mention we didn’t even know what fathers were contributing to the production of a fetus. clearly it was something, since you can’t get pregnant without a penis getting involved, but we have literally not known what until the past few decades. and that is wild. it has colored ALL of human history, all of our conceptions of society and family and kinship and gender, all of it, and it hadn’t even occurred to me until it was spelled out for me in this book, and it’s just......wow.

Salty, sweet or savory: for christmas my sister and I made seven different types of cookie, most of them involving chocolate somehow.

Craving: no bc I ate so many cookies. unless sleep counts. or maybe pringles, it’s been many moons since last I had a potato chip and I miss them.

Coffee or Tea: no thank you

Tagging: @coloursisee, @krchy-tuna, @sam-j-squirrel, @xzienne, @mirandatam, @viciousmaukeries, @sepulchritude, @elidyce, and @navigatorsnorth bc it’s been a while since we’ve talked, and I’m super hyped that you’re married now. v happy for you!

[oneweekoneband]

In the first cold hours of a new December morning, Taylor Swift once again revealed herself to be the primary antagonist in my hero’s journey. Weary and woebegone as I am, I will not waste strength on any attempt to deny that this latest attack has knocked me off balance, but I believe it is important that I—we, really, the lot of us who have been bloodied pitiably beneath this most brutal show of force—rebound immediately into a defensive posture so that there might be any hope at all for survival. Taylor’s second pandemic album will be released at midnight tonight, so I guess Shakespeare and his little “play” about elder abuse can get fucked after all. The album is called evermore. It was hubris, I can see in retrospect, which led me to tempt my enemy by writing all these words about her on this, the week of her birthday, knowing as I do that Taylor is one of those especially dangerous adults who make a big deal about both birthdays and lucky numbers. Icarus is my name now, covered in melted wax and tumbling to the sea. So as to steel ourselves for these horrors yet to come, I offer now, with not arrogance but the faith of the foolhardy, my best conjecture as to the content of each detestable track. 

willow - Could be about a tree. Could be about a girl. More likely it is both somehow, which is extremely pervy, and not just because that’s part of the plot of the unspeakably cursed The Raven Cycle novels, which I, a full blown adult with, generally speaking, normal brain function, voluntarily read for the first time this summer because some of us, ma’am, used the pandemic for activities that hurt only ourselves, not others. Well, happy holidays, tree fuckers.

champagne problems - Whatever this is, know that I will be considering it a work after Fall Out Boy’s “Champagne for My Real Friends, Real Pain for My Sham Friends” and I’ll be right to do so and many people will say as much admiringly and they’ll smile at me with pride and doff their caps as I go.

gold rush - If this song is anything but a loving, comprehensive summation of the children’s novel DEAR AMERICA Seeds of Hope: The Gold Rush Diary of Susanna Fairchild then I’m going to walk directly out of my home and, deadly virus be damned, keep walking until I’ve entered Taylor Swift’s instead, at which point I will begin to scream out a litany of complaints at the very top of my voice, ceasing only when her security team kills me or we fall in love.

tis the damn season - Worst case scenario this is a sad Christmas song (the best kind of Christmas song) and it devastates me in the most degrading way possible. Best case scenario it’s really bad and dumb and I can live without pain.

tolerate it - Many possibilities here. Could be about white-knuckling it through a period of depression, or a breakup. Most obviously, it could be about COVID-19 lockdowns keeping us trapped in our homes, disconnected from loved ones, going slow-brained and strange, bowls piling up, and suddenly so desperate for human interaction that even memories of having drinks with somebody from Hinge who quoted Friends twice in an hour are tantalizing in comparison to the touch-starved dreamstate of staying indoors... But I kinda feel like this is Taylor replying “COPE” from on high to my tweets about how I would rather be boiled alive than have to face the existence of this record.

no body, no crime (feat. Haim) - What would be very good is if this is a homosexual romp about Taylor Swift and the one hot Haim guitar girl with the really gay energy doing a murder together a la “Somethin’ Bad” by Miranda Lambert with Carrie Underwood, but honestly, it is probably another song about Gone Girl.

happiness - Impossible to speak on this since, thanks to Taylor Swift, happiness is something with which I have no familiarity. 

dorothea - Have seen chirping on the odious bird application about how perhaps this song title suggests that Taylor has written a song about Middlemarch, titling it for Dorothea Brooke, but I reject this because it implies that Taylor has read Middlemarch, which is a premise I cannot accept. Whether this refusal is out of self-preservation, being unwilling and in fact unable to face a world where Taylor Swift read and was moved to creation by the novel which was my most essential friend the summer I got dumped by a guy who I still had to work feet away from in a candle factory for another month, and about which Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson whose birthday it happens to be today, which isn’t to say that this means anything about anything. I am simply trying to batten down all hatches literally and spiritually in light of having been had once again by this numerology obsessed demon) once wrote "What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory.” or because I just at my core do not believe that Taylor has read a single book since Gone Girl I couldn’t possibly say.

coney island (feat. The National) : Some ungodly americana ass bullshit that is going to ruin my life. The thought of holy terror shaped like a horse girl Taylor Swift and trickster nymph in the body of a tax accountant Matt Berninger, two individuals I have allowed, separately, to cause me grievous psychic harm, having even the barest amount of one to one contact, even digitally, has made me want to peel all my skin off and put it back on flipped inside out so that I might, when I look in the mirror, see a version of myself which approximates how I feel.

ivy - Another song for the plant lesbians. That’s fine, and I’m happy for that community, but what I want to know, looking at this growing pile of songs named after women, is where, Taylor, is the song about loudmouth queen Inez, legendary gossip and, for my money, the star of folklore?  

cowboy like me - Putting it as mildly as humanly possible, to slit my throat would be less cruel. I am drawing a straight line from me writing illegible sequels to perfect film An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (itself a sequel) in crayon as a toddler, to Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” on the radio in my mom’s two door Honda, to me everyday after school in third grade changing into the cowboy costume my godmother bought, to me at fourteen internalizing a sense of righteous indignation that would take years to even begin to outgrow when Crash beat Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture, to the winter I dropped half my classes out of fear and sickness and read paperback westerns on the twenty third floor of the college library for tens of hours at a go, to the profoundly gay episode of Supernatural called “Tombstone” which is, yes, named for the profoundly gay cowboy film Tombstone, to the inspired and revitalizing pause in “Space Cowboy” by Kacey Musgraves where she’s like, “You can have your space........ cowboy”, to Mitski’s Be the Cowboy, to the perfect boygenius cover of certified classic “Cowboy Take Me Away”, to whatever the hell this is going to be.That line is not to make a point at all. It’s just that there is a line and beside it there is me, incapacitated.

long story short - Just like all the other times anyone has ever invoked this phrase in the entire history of human beings expressing themselves with language, it is going to be a huge lie, because this woman never shuts up.

marjorie - After all that Taylor has put me through over the years, she should have at least named one of these wretched things “ellen” after my dead Sagittarian grandmother, whose birthday is tomorrow, December 11th, which is again, the release date of Taylor Swift’s second album in sixth months, but it’s probably for the best that she didn’t because you simpletons would immediately think it was an homage to George Bush’s friend Dory the fish, and therefore gay, regardless of the actual text of the song, and it’d be the “betty” massacre all over again. That being said, this is almost assuredly another horny song about some mid-century white lady. Only days ago Taylor was telling Entertainment Weekly that she’s been watching a lot of movies in quarantine, and while she didn’t name 1958’s Marjorie Morningstar starring Natalie Wood, I wouldn’t put it past her.

closure - God, I hope this one is another Kaylor classic so we can all act like complete raving lunatics online from the confines of our own plague quarters for a few days. It’s been a hard year.

evermore (feat. Bon Iver) - I’ll be catatonic by this point. Who cares?

right where you left me - Yes, in hell.

it’s time to go - Yes, TO HELL.

[neroushalvaus]

Top 10 favourite characters from any fandom

I was tagged by @limalepakko , thank you! Since I have recently listed male characters here (or you know, in August, but we all know time hasn't been a thing for many moons), I took the liberty to list characters in general this time. I also went with which characters feel right at the moment, so does not show all my favourites. I also try to keep these short. (edit: okay so these are not remotely short, I will post a list first and have the explanations be under the cut, read if you want to hear my ramblings c': )

1. Fantine, Les Misérables 2. Javert / Jean Valjean, Les Misérables (yes i am cheating) 3. Carrie "Big Boo" Black, Orange Is the New Black 4. Jane Marple, Agatha Christie's Marple 5. Aunt Lydia, The Handmaid's Tale 6. Bridget Jones, Bridget Jones books & movies 7. Rock Lee, Naruto 8. Sarah O'Brien, Downton Abbey 9. Marilla Cuthbert, Anne of Green Gables / Anne with an E 10. Sister Monica Joan, Call the Midwife

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1. Fantine, Les Misérables

I love Fantine with all my heart. I remember reading Les Mis for the first time and her story sending chills down my spine. Her character development makes me so sad, from a girl who falls hard and fast and won't deny anything from her lover, to a woman who is so beaten down by society that she can't do anything but laugh at her fate. But I love how she doesn't lose her pride or her fighting spirit and how she still has the guts to spit in Valjean's face when she sees him after being arrested. And I love how all she does is for her daughter and how despite selling "the gold on her head and the pearls in her mouth" she is content, because all that matters to her is that Cosette will live.

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2. Javert & Jean Valjean, Les Misérables

I was really trying to limit this list to one character per fandom, but alas, I am but a weak little person. Thus, I am cheating already. The thing is that when it comes to Les Mis characters, Fantine, Javert and Valjean are the eternal top 3 for me, but I'm never quite able to say who I love the most. Last time I picked Javert for the male character meme because I love the symbolism and critique of society his character embodies, but let it be known that Jean Valjean is the best character in all of literature and I will fight you on this. The original soft on crime icon (aside from Jesus Christ but they're the same and you know it). Valjean's character journey is such a complicated one from an ordinary man (no worse than any man) to a person, who had been shaped by society and criminal justice system to be a very dangerous man, to someone you could compare to a saint if you wanted to... To an ordinary man, who would do anything for his daughter. He has so many character-defining moments, the biggest ones being in my opinion the trial of Champmathieu and letting Javert go instead of killing him. I just love Jean Valjean so much and could speak about him for hours.

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3. Carrie "Big Boo" Black, Orange Is the New Black

Hopping away from the Les Mis hole and into a OITNB hole. I was debating on whether I'd put Boo or Pennsatucky on this list since I love them both so much, but I've been feeling so much love for my angry butch king that it had to be her. First of all, I'm just so happy to see butch lesbian representation where the butch identity is not just a joke. I know OITNB sometimes uses Boo questionably, but in general she is a nuanced character and one of the most interesting ones in the series in my opinion. I'm so sad they forgot all about her on the last seasons. I love everything about her, how she has trouble with feelings besides anger and often deflects serious stuff through humor, how fiercely protective she is of those she loves (boosatucky otp forever fucking fight me), how proud she is of her butch identity ("i refuse to be invisible")... Also, not to express attraction, but... Mama I'm in love with a criminal. And not to be a slut for how characters view religion/spirituality/God, but the relieved smile she has in one of her flashbacks when she says "there's no God... there's nothing", like you can't just do stuff like that and expect me not to love the character to bits.

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4. Jane Marple, Agatha Christie's Marple

Last time I listed Poirot and was a bit frustrated I couldn't list Marple, but now it's time to right that wrong! I love this little old lady so much. I love Agatha Christie so much for just going "you know who is the person who knows everything that's going on in a community, and thus would make the perfect detective for a detective story? the nosy old woman". As she is introduced in The Murder at the Vicarage: "Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner — Miss Weatherby is a mixture of vinegar and gush. Of the two Miss Marple is much more dangerous." She is so likable and witty, you can't help but love her. My favourite portrayal of her is by Geraldine McEwan, she looks so gentle but has such a sharp gaze. I would spill all my secrets to her any day. I also am compelled to tell you that when I was a child we had a costume party at my school and I dressed up as Marple and learned some old lady things in English (it was before third grade so I didn't know much English back then) just for the occasion (such as "thank you, my dear", "what a lovely necklace you are wearing" or "there has been a murder"). Teacher might have thought me rather morbid but I remember that day being quite good.

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5. Aunt Lydia, The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale is such a great series and a book and Aunt Lydia is such a great character. The way she's capable of being absolutely cruel and vicious, but how she is also protective and caring in her own way. One of my favourite scenes in this series is when Serena Joy (my other favourite, can you tell) tells Lydia to "remove the damaged ones" from a line of handmaids and Lydia tries to argue with her. Sure, she is responsible for some of the punishments these women are now "damaged" by, but she truly believes those punishments were for a greater good and now the handmaids deserve their place with the others as much as anyone else. It is chilling and the character is such a dark shade of morally gray, but I can't get enough of it. The actress who plays her, Ann Dowd, has so interesting thoughts about her, like here. I just love this character so much I could scream.

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6. Bridget Jones, Bridget Jones books & movies

I'm mostly talking about the movies here because Renée Zellweger's performance is iconic. Plus the movies are what made me love this character first. But I'll give it to the books, they're one of the few books I've laughed out loud while reading. Anyway, how do you even begin explaining the love I have for Bridget Jones... I love how she is a character so many people can relate but who would be a comic relief side character in some other story. Yes, yes, it is really bad that she is constantly described as fat when she really is not, but when I was growing up she gave me hope that people who are viewed as fat and/or unattractive by other people can be admired and appreciated, and they don't have to be super talented at everything and highly intelligent and some kind of a super smooth social butterfly to "make up" for what they "lack". And also that they can have standards (i once dodged a bullet by rejecting someone by pretty much subconsciously quoting Bridget Jones so..). I also love how the comedic tone of everything does not dismiss Bridget's feelings. For example in some other movie we maybe would concentrate on how "stupid" Bridget was to trust that Daniel was in love with her, but in Bridget Jones we concentrate on how Bridget was hurt by Daniel cheating on her, how he is the one who did wrong. Idk I just love Bridget Jones so very much can you tell.

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7. Rock Lee, Naruto

Aka the boy who would have kicked Madara in the balls if Kishimoto had any sense of drama and good storytelling. I think I robbed Lee by not putting him on the fav male characters list. You know that post that goes like "gays be like 'these are my comfort characters', 1 literal ray of sunshine, 2 war criminal" etc? This child is the sunshine. I've been reading and watching Naruto again ( @hapanmaitogai is my sideblog for that nonsense) and I'm so ready to adopt Lee and/or Gai. Rock Lee is just such an earnest character, he has a goal he will give anything to achieve and he's the one true underdog in this manga. I love how he's so kind and polite (it's not so clear in English but in the Finnish translation he speaks as formally as he does in Japanese, he uses singular polite "you", calls Sakura "Sakura-neiti" = "Miss Sakura" etc... i love one polite boy). Also, he has the best fights in the series. Like Lee vs Gaara is a Classic, but we simply can't forget that time Lee absolutely crushed Sasuke in just a few minutes, or that time he politely asked Kimimaro not to kill him while he drinks his medicine. The best boy. I love that boy so much.

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8. Sarah O'Brien, Downton Abbey

Last time it was Thomas' turn, so now I must talk about the snakiest snake, the queen of weaponized handmaidenry, Miss O'Brien. She is such a great character especially in the first two seasons (I obviously love her on season three as well but Julian Fellowes really tried to make it hard by not explaining her actions at all, didn't he. Well, luckily I am ready to stuff the gaps with my headcanons). She has some of the best comebacks in the series and brings some needed realism in some conversations. I also love how she uses her position as a lady's maid for her advantage and how she is proud of her profession despite being highly aware of the power structures in the Abbey. And then there is the soap. That is such a good character moment, because for a character who always plans ahead, who is ruthless and cunning and intelligent... I don't think O'Brien thought about the soap thing at all before she left the room ("Sarah O'Brien, this is not who you are" hit me like a train). Just once she did something with nothing but anger motivating her and that became one of the defining moments of her character. And one of the defining things of the future relationship between her and Cora. That's why I find the Sarah/Cora ship so interesting, because there will always be the undercurrent of bitter regret. Also Sarah O'Brien and Thomas Barrow are the greatest brotp and Fellowes was a coward for driving the smoking scheming gay best friends apart, and

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9. Marilla Cuthbert, Anne of Green Gables / Anne with an E

I'm not saying L.M. Montgomery is entirely responsible for me having a fondness for strict, older women who first act unkind but have a heart of gold, but she most certainly did not help. Between characters like Marilla Cuthbert and Elizabeth Murray, how can you not fall in love with the type? It's been a while since I read the Anne series, but I really love how Marilla's character has been adapted into the Anne with an E tv series. Geraldine James looks like she was born to play her, she has me in tears so often. She has the ability to portray someone like Marilla, who is a very hard and stern person but feels deeply for her loved ones. I was watching the episode that dealt with Matthew's heart attack and Marilla berating her brother while hugging herself like she was trying so hard to hold herself together absolutely destroyed my heart.

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10. Sister Monica Joan, Call the Midwife

It was a tough choice between her and Sister Evangelina. I just love these nuns very much. Sister Monica Joan is such a lovable and wise character. She is so knowledgeable of many subjects, from the Bible to astrology, and I feel like her unspecified memory problems and confusion are handled very tastefully. I also love how she's such an important part of her community despite not working as a midwife anymore. She is such a kind woman and gets visibly upset when others are treated poorly. And how could I not mention her saying "I do not believe in weeds. A weed is simply a flower that someone decides is in the wrong place", like... I love her so so much.

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I won't tag anyone, but if you read this and you want to do this, consider yourself tagged and you're no allowed to mark me as the one who tagged you!

[bananaofswifts]

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.” Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?” Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.